Syrian Jews role in the anti-French movement

During the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, Syria’s new ruler, Emir Faisal told US President Woodrow Wilson that the Syrians refused any kind of foreign mandate, be it French or British, on Syrian land recently liberated from the Ottoman Empire. He presented him with a petition from the Grand Mufti of Damascus and the Patriarch of Antioch and All the East, and the Chief Rabi of the Syrian capital, calling for the full and unconditional independence of Syria.

Syrian Jews were always at the forefront of the nationalist movement in Syria, and were always treated, as first-class citizens. Yusuf Lindau, a wealthy merchant from Damascus, was voted deputy in the first post-Ottoman Parliament in 1919, and he helped crown Faisal as king, signing another petition that curtly refused the Balfour Declaration, which gave the Zionists “a national home” in Palestine. Lindau won with a landslide victory – again – in 1928, serving on a committee that drafted Syria’s first republican constitution, along with nationalist heavyweights like future president, Hashem al-Atassi.

Prime Minister Taj al-Din al-Hasani made it obligatory in any parliament to have one seat for a Jewish deputy, which continued to be the norm until the Palestine War of 1948. In 1943, Azra Azraq was voted into parliament and served on its Financial Committee along with Aleppo chief, Abdul Rahman Kayyali. After independence from the French, another Jewish notable, Wahid Mizrai, ran for parliament on a list backed by the Islamic scholars of Damascus, Abdul Hamid Tabba, Abu al-Kheir Midani, and Syria’s future Grand Mufti, Ahmad Kaftaro.

Known to locals as “al-Taifa al-Musawiyya” (The Moses Sect), they strongly condemned the rise of Zionism and creation of Israel in 1948. When synagogues were attacked in Damascus and Aleppo in 1948, then-Prime Minister Jamil Mardam Bey rushed to the scene, calling on locals and police to protect Hayy al-Yahud, or the Jewish quarters of town.